The Anti-Advertising Agency

Born in 1970, Packard Harrison Jennings grew up in Oakland, CA. The son of a modernist architect and a graphic designer, Packard grew up drawing, sculpting, and animating with the wide variety of art supplies around his home. At San Francisco State he majored in sculpture with a minor in animation.He began his first large body of subversive public work in 1996 when he moved into an Oakland warehouse that was situated underneath a neon, day-glow Newport Cigarette billboard. Starting with the simple alteration of blacking out a tooth, Packard continued to alter this billboard over the next two years, putting up increasingly ambitious socio-political commentary with each posted advertisement. In 1998 Packard arrived at Alfred University in rural western New York for graduate school. He became fascinated by the devastating effects of Walmart on the neighboring town of Hornel. After researching the inner workings of Walmart, he produced eight products from a fictional line, known as the Centennial Society, that comment on various aspects of Walmart’s business practice and product origin. He proceeded to place multiples of these fake products, such as the Kathie Lee Gifford XS Kiddie Tee, Plastic Bric-A-Brac, and the Mussolini Action Figure, on the shelves of Walmart Stores across western New York. This work became a half an hour film about his product placement, Wal-mart, and the town of Hornel. Packard has continued to work in this manner of humorous, subversive public art.

Packard has shown work in Barcelona and Madrid, Spain, Geneva, Switzerland, Turin, Italy, Brussels, Belgium, Paris, France, Canada, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Kansas City, Washington DC, and many other American cities.His art has been published in New American Painting, Adbusters, Playboy, Anthem, Rolling Thunder, Kitchen Sink, Scene Missing, New Art Examiner, and Atomica. His work has been written about in Art Forum, the New York Times, Flash Art, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and the Boston Phoenix. He has recieved artist residencies from the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi, the Sanitary Fill Company, ThreeWalls in Chicago, and Cite des Arts in Paris. Packard is represented by Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and Analix-Forever in Geneva, Switzerland. He currently makes Oakland his base of operations.